Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries / Department: English

Submitted diploma thesis focuses on the analysis of preserved documents and correspondence of the Duchess of Burgundy Alix of Vergy. The thesis surveys the political and donational pursuit of the duchess during the years 1206-1251 just on the basis of this kind of sources. The thesis analyzes individual documents and letters and subsequently reflects in them the events of the time period and the personality of the Duchess of Burgundy. In the first part are briefly outlined the realities of the burgundian region during this time period and the importance of the reformed orders for the area. Outlined is also the rule of dukes Hugh III. and Odo III. and also the life events of Alix of Vergy from being the wife of Odo III., through being the regent up to the position of mother of the ruling Duke of Burgundy. In the new chapter the thesis outlines the view on the role of medieval women, issue of their rights and disposal of power and free will. In the second part the thesis deals with the analysis of documents and correspondence of Alix of Vergy in particular periods of life. The diploma thesis on the basis of the source reconstructs the extent of her political power, independence and free decision-making throughout her life. Part of the thesis is a comparation of the analysis of the written material of...

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Unreliable homodiegetic narration presents a unique mode of narrative transmission which demands the encoding within the text of 'translational indices', that is, signifiers of several kinds which justify the reader/receiver in over-riding the sincere first person avowals of the apparent mediator of the discourse. The argument establishes the presence of an epistemologically primary 'immanent' narrative situation within an ostensibly unitary narrative situation. Such a stereoscopic perspective upon the presented world of the literary 'work provides the reader/receiver with a warrant for a rejection of the epistemological validity of the homodiegetic narrator's discourse. Moreover, the thesis advances a typology of such translational indices as they occur in the dense ontology of the literary work of art. The narratological theory of unreliable homodiegetic narration developed in the first half of the dissertation is applied in the second half to selected exemplars of such narrative transmissions, demonstrating thereby the theoretical fecundity of the model for the discipline of narratology. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1988.

“Circulating Knowledges: Literature and the Idea of the Library in Renaissance England” pairs literary texts and libraries to illustrate how literary creation and library building in England from 1500 to 1700 were deeply invested in one another. The history of English Renaissance libraries has generally been analyzed from the viewpoints of religious history and historiography, seen by scholars as a story of Protestant librarians attempting to preserve (or invent) a history of Protestant England. Many literary critics —citing Thomas Bodley’s notorious distaste for “stage plaies”—have typically reduced institutional libraries to elitist boogeymen hostile to popular or vernacular literature. Revising these narratives, this dissertation brings together a large corpus, including works by Thomas More, John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish, to illustrate how literary depictions of England’s fledgling libraries shaped their creation and development, while the practices of these inchoate libraries in turn influenced literary texts. “Circulating Knowledges” advances its argument on several fronts. First, I show that developments (or a perceived lack of development) in library organization, access, and use appeared in literary texts, which often depicted literary libraries in response to these developments. Second, I home in on moments when literary texts that seem not at all interested in libraries become unexpectedly fruitful texts through which to develop literary thinking about libraries. In the process of excavating this literary interest in libraries, I demonstrate that Renaissance literature concerns itself not only with depicting, commenting on, or objecting to the developments in library creation happening during the period, but also in imagining alternative possibilities for how libraries might function, conceptions of a library that often outstripped what was materially possible in the period: these conceptions I term “the idea of the library.” In detailing literature’s preoccupation with developments in Renaissance library systems, I offer new perspectives on the period’s literary attitudes toward the creation, transmission, and protection of knowledge, all questions which the building—or imagining—of a library brings to the forefront.

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This dissertation offers a new interpretation of the metaphysics of two seventeenth-century women philosophers – Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Anne Conway (1631–1679) – and brings to light an unnoticed tradition in seventeenth-century philosophy. I argue that both Cavendish and Conway can be understood as panpsychist-materialist monists: despite their other differences, they agree that there is one kind of substance in nature or creation, and that the single sort of substance always displays material features and mental capacities. Further, I propose that Cavendish and Conway are joined by the physician Francis Glisson (1597–1677) and the poet John Milton (1608–1674) as examples of a distinct panpsychist-materialist tendency in early modern England. ‘Panpsychist-materialist monism’ may at first seem too clunky to serve as the moniker of a movement, but it earns its keep by accurately capturing three elements of the figures’ systems that, when studied together as a group of related commitments, reveal the philosophical significance of each person’s views. My reading therefore bears on the project of interpreting Cavendish and Conway on their own terms and changes the way their context should be understood. Moreover, to the extent that contemporary philosophers of mind draw on philosophers from history in the formulation of their current views, the work presented in this dissertation stands to make a difference in present-day philosophy as well.

This dissertation presents a previously unedited text by one of the most distinguished- yet neglected-Latin writers of the Italian Renaissance, Ercole Strozzi (1471-1508), a poet and administrator in the court of Ferrara. Under the Este Dukes, Ferrara became a major center of literary and artistic patronage. The Latin literary output of the court, however, has received insufficient scholarly scrutiny. The text is a verse funeral elegy of Eleonora of Aragon (1450-1493), the first Duchess of Ferrara. Eleonora was a remarkable woman whose talents and indefatigable efforts on behalf of her husband, her children, and her state, won her accolades both at home and abroad. She also served as a prototype for the remarkable careers of her two daughters, Isabella d'Este, and Beatrice d'Este, who are celebrated for their erudition and patronage of arts and letters. The text is a mirror of the Estense court and reveals to us how its members no doubt saw themselves, at the very peak of its temporal power and the height of its prestige as a center of cultural creativity. It is also important for the striking portrait it presents of Eleonora. Ercole Strozzi chose to call his poem an epicedium, an ancient minor literary genre that had received attention in the two decades prior to its composition, due to the discovery and printing of the silver age Roman poet Statius, whose text includes several epicedia. Strozzi deftly adapts and transcends both his ancient and contemporary models (especially Poliziano), and in the process, creates a new Latin literary genre, the Renaissance epicedium. It is a fine poem, full of both erudition and creativity, and as such is the first fruits of what would be Ercole Strozzi's illustrious poetic career. The work is genuinely worthy of study on both esthetic and historical grounds.

This dissertation argues that in Renaissance discourses of the body the body is progressively evacuated of the spirit, as we move from texts of the late Medieval period to texts of the Jacobean period. Where New Historicists have suggested that the practice of “self-fashioning,” which dictates behaviour, speech and dress, takes place in the Renaissance, I argue that there was a material self-fashioning of the body occurring simultaneously. Such corporeal fashioning, motivated by desire for physical improvement, frustrates the extent to which the soul shapes the body. My Introduction lays theoretical and historical groundwork, situating the body/soul relationship in relation to Christian theology, Senecan-Stoicism, Epicureanism and philosophical materialism. Discourses of artistic creation, informed by neo-Platonism, also influence corporeal fashioning in that the most radical bodily modifications are imagined through literature, where artificers are often privileged as creators. Chapter One examines “The Miracle of the Black Leg,” a transplant, by the doctor-Saints Cosmas and Damian, of a Moor’s black leg to a white Sacristan, whose gangrenous leg is amputated. In written and pictorial representations Cosmas and Damian, initially figured as Saints, are later presented as doctors who perform a medical procedure. Alongside the doctors’ increasing agency, the black leg itself, inflected by Renaissance notions of Moors and Moorishness, troubles the soul’s immanence in the body. Chapter Two examines Elizabeth I’s practices of bodily fashioning through her wigs, dentures and cosmetics. I argue that Elizabeth’s symbolic value, which includes components of monarchical rule, as well as attitudes toward female beauty, is always already pre-empted by her body. In Book III of The Faerie Queene, moreover, Edmund Spenser writes an alternative history of England through Britomart’s body to provide an heir to Elizabeth’s otherwise heirless throne. Chapters Three and Four perform close readings of Book II of The Faerie Queene, Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, Thomas Middleton’s The Maiden’s Tragedy and Revenger’s Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. I argue that both the allegorical and theatrical modes demand a level of materialism that paradoxically makes the body the centre of attention, and anticipates Cartesian mechanistic dualism. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-25 22:59:31.67

Towards the end of the 19th century Oscar Wilde wrote the four society plays that would become his most famous dramatical works: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The plays combined characteristic Wildean witticisms with cunning social criticism of Victorian society, using stereotypical characters such as the dandy, the fallen woman and the “ideal” woman to mock the double moral and strict social expectations of Victorian society. These plays, and to an extent also Wilde’s symbolist drama Salomé (1891), have been the object of a great deal of scholarly interest, with countless studies conducted on them from various angles and theoretical perspectives. Widely under-discussed, however, are Wilde’s two Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, The Duchess of Padua (1883) and A Florentine Tragedy (1894). This thesis therefore sets out to explore The Duchess of Padua and A Florentine Tragedy in order to gain a broader understanding of Wilde’s forgotten dramatical works, while also rediscovering two of Wilde’s most transgressive female characters—Beatrice and Bianca. Challenging traditional ideas of gender and female sexuality, Beatrice and Bianca can be read as proto-feminist figures who continually act transgressively, using their voice and agency to stand up against patriarchy and asserting their rights to experience their lives on their own terms. Through an in-depth study of these plays, this thesis will demonstrate that Wilde’s Elizabethan-Jacobean tragedies, with their strong, modern female characters Beatrice and Bianca deserve greater critical attention on a par with the extensive scholarship on Wilde’s well-known dramatical works.